"Exceptionally tasteful"?(Notes & Comments: September 2004)(review of "Disparities & Deformations" in Santa Fe, New Mexico)

When we look around the contemporary art world, especially at those precincts that are hailed as "cutting-edge" by the Art Establishment, we are often reminded of two passages from Robert Musil's great novel The Man Without Qualities, set in the months before the outbreak of World War I. The first is the passage where Musil describes how his hero, Ulrich, becomes a man "ohne Eigenschaften." It happened when he read somewhere about "a race horse of genius." If a horse can be a genius, what's left for a clever homo sapiens? The second passage describes the decadent cultural situation that gave rise to this bumpercrop of "genius."

 
   Sharp borderlines everywhere became blurred, 
   and some new, indescribable capacity for entering 
   into hitherto unheard-of relationships 
   threw up new people and new ideas.... [T]he 
   good was adulterated with a little too much of 
   the bad, the truth with error, and the meaning 
   with a little too much of the spirit of accommodation. 
   There positively seemed to be certain 
   proportions in which these elements had 
   to be blended for maximum success in the 
   world. A little admixture of ersatz was all that 
   was wanted ... 

On a recent visit to Santa Fe, we stopped by that mountain community's "alternative" art center, SITE Santa Fe, and Musil was never far from our mind. We happened to be there soon after "Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque," the museum's fifth biennial exhibition, opened. Now, whenever the word "biennial" comes into contact with art these days, the result is invariably fatuous. Think of the Whitney's biennials; think of the biennials in Sao Paulo, in Venice: for as long as anyone can remember, they've been tired recycling centers where yesterday's trendy cliches are loudly celebrated by the Art Establishment in an orgy of self-congratulation.

Poor Santa Fe! They tried so desperately hard to be "with it." They even engaged Robert Storr, sometime curator at the Museum of Modern Art, to organize the exhibition: how's that for big-city credentials? But SITE Santa Fe hopped on the pseudo-avant-garde band wagon too late. "Disparities & Deformations" has all the old-timers: Sigmar Polke, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, and Cindy Sherman. There are mildly pornographic cartoons by R. Crumb, a couple of truly icky pieces in beeswax and pubic hair by Robert Gober, and a video by Bruce Nauman called "S--in Your Hat--Head on a Chair," which depicts a mime pretending to enact what the title suggests. Paul McCarthy weighs in with "Penis Hat," a very large, very juvenile object.

A couple of decades ago, exhibitions devoted to such stuff were irritating--all that scatological or politically rebarbative stuff crowding out the real art. The flaks in the press office and media kept telling ...